Re: What's left over.

Rob Landley
2002-11-04T07:08:19Z

On Friday 01 November 2002 16:16, Patrick Finnegan wrote:

> > It's not a fscking public service. Linus has full control over his
> > tree. You have equally full control over your tree. Linus can't
> > tell you what patches to apply in your tree. You can't tell Linus
> > what patches he should apply to his.
>
> I'm sorry it _is_ a public service. Once tens of people started
> contributing to it, it became one. This is like saying that the
> Washington Monument belongs to the peole that maintain it, any building
> belongs to the repair crews and janitors.

You pay taxes to support the washington monument. When's the last time you
paid a tax to Linus?

> I'm not saying that Linus is
> necessarily a janitor, but when you consider how much of the Linux kernel
> that he didn't write, you may relize that it's not just his kernel.

He's the editor of a periodical publication. A cross between an academic
technical journal which people contribute to for professional reasons, and a
hobbyist fanzine that people contribute to 'cause it's cool. This is not a
new thing, there are real-world precedents for this sort of relationship
going back hundreds of years, to the invention of the printing press...

Linus's editorial decisions are as final and unappealable as any other
editorial decision at a magazine or newspaper. You can publish your article
elsewhere, and if it doesn't have the same prestige as the Harvard Law Review
or the New England Journal of Medicine, tough. They said no.

And like ALL editors, his job isn't to write a significant portion of the
articles in the publication, but to be a Sturgeon's Law filter throwing out
99% of the submissions in the slush pile, correcting the spelling and grammar
of the remaining few, and trying to stitch them together into a coherent
whole.

Go track down somebody with a Journalism degree if you want to understand
Linus's job.

> It
> also belongs to every single person that has written even a single
> line of code in it.

If you get an article published in Time magazine, and you say that this gives
you the right to print your own copies of Time and distribute them yourself,
Time's lawyers are going to come after you.

The GPL gives you the ability to do this, but it doesn't obligate the
publication's editor to listen to you. If next month's issue contains a huge
rebuttal to one of your articles, calling you a boogerhead, tough. The
editor doesn't owe you anything as a previous contributor, and certainly
doesn't owe you anything as someone from whom he did NOT take a submission.

What Linus basically said was that if a significant number of distributions
integrated it, he might take another look at the thing in the future. But
wasn't going into 2.5.

Now, thanks to people pestering him beyond the Annoyance Event Horizon, he's
got his fingers in his ears. Congratulations. Hopefully, he'll calm down a
bit in a few months, but there's no guarantee. In the mean time, the most
productive thing to do is drop the topic and work on the Red Hat, SuSE, and
Debian guys. (Mandrake feeds from Red Hat, and SuSE is now making kernels
for Connectiva and TurboLinux. Gentoo and Slackware might be good to bug as
well...)

See if you can convince Alan Cox to pick up your patch. That'll get you Red
Hat, and the single largest concentration of roll-your-own kernel guys
outside of Linus's own tree.

Rob

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